Microsoft buys Nokia’s phone business for $7.1 billion

Microsoft and Nokia announced today that Nokia's Devices & Services business—the part of the company that builds all Nokia's phones (both smart and otherwise)—is changing hands. Microsoft is paying €5.44 billion ($7.17 billion) for the struggling Nokia division. The deal, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval, is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014.

In the transaction, all of Nokia's device business, including design, manufacturing, sales, marketing, and support, becomes a part of Microsoft. This includes 32,000 staff, of which 4,700 are in Finland.

Remaining behind is Nokia Solutions and Networks (formerly Nokia Siemens Networks), which builds telecommunications equipment and mapping division HERE (Navteq). Nokia is also retaining its Advanced Technologies group, which develops and licenses intellectual property. These parts together account for about half of Nokia's revenue and approximately 24,000 staff.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop—formerly of Microsoft—will be succeeded as Nokia CEO by Risto Siilasmaa. Elop will serve as Executive Vice President of Devices & Services, and Nokia expects that he will move to Microsoft once the deal is closed.

The headline €5.44 billion figure is split €3.79 billion ($4.99 billion) for Devices & Services and €1.65 billion ($2.17 billion) for a patent agreement. Under that agreement, Redmond is buying a ten-year license to Nokia's patents, with an option to make the ten-year agreement perpetual. Microsoft is also acquiring Nokia's various licenses to patents from Qualcomm, IBM, Motorola Mobility, and Motorola Solutions.

Additionally, and not as part of this transaction, Microsoft is licensing the HERE platform for four years. For HERE, this will substantially replace the internal cross-billing that currently occurs, and Microsoft will become one of HERE's top three customers.

Finally, Microsoft is obtaining a limited license to Nokia's brand names. The Lumia (smartphone) and Asha (featurephone) brands move to Microsoft. Redmond can continue to use the Nokia brand on all current products and can also use it for ten years on any products based on Nokia's Series 30 and Series 40 featurephone platforms. However, it appears that future smartphones will not be permitted to carry the Nokia brand.

Microsoft says that it will continue to license Windows Phone to other OEMs.

Redmond says that with the purchase, its gross margin on each Nokia phone will grow from less than $10 per unit to more than $40 per unit, with "synergies" saving about $600 million in costs each year, and that the deal should start contributing positively to earnings per share by the 2016 financial year. The deal will be financed with offshore cash (just as happened with the Skype purchase).

Almost ALL independent developers for the Nokia ecosystem were Qt developers, although some were working on WebRunTime just because it was the least braindead way of building apps for Symbian before Qt. So telling Qt developers to get lost was one sure-fire way of killing Nokia's platform dead.

Why? Apple basically did the same thing to them (as Apple required everyone to use Cocoa Touch and Objective-C), and it didn't harm them. Or are you saying that Nokia could only attract the small-time independent developers to Meego? Why did Apple and Google manage to attract not only those, but the big-time developers as well?

And what did those developers end up doing? Starting developing for iOS or Android? So if they were capable of doing THAT transition, why couldn't they make the transition to WP? Or if they did move to WP, then they did become developers for Nokia new platform. Or did they choose not to move to WP because it was too small? In that case, why did they stick to Qt/Symbian, which was crashing down?

And what did those developers end up doing? Starting developing for iOS or Android? So if they were capable of doing THAT transition, why couldn't they make the transition to WP? Or if they did move to WP, then they did become developers for Nokia new platform. Or did they choose not to move to WP because it was too small? In that case, why did they stick to Qt/Symbian, which was crashing down?

Because there was nothing to transition to. Elop said "we're moving to Windows 8!" before there was even much information on ActiveRT let alone any examples or an SDK.

Yes, it did matter. If they chose to continue with MeeGo they would've had a top-notch in-house OS and a top-notch hardware. Now, they have nothing (mobile division). Running a company into the ground and selling it off isn't difficult; creating something of your own is. Elop did the former.

You make it sound like Meego was basically done, and Elop snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. They managed to put it in _one_ device. And even then it was not real Meego, but bastardized version of it. The real Meego was obviously not finished yet. Had they rallied behind Meego, maybe they would have been able to ship it later. But they would have been losing time in any case. And they would then be wed to a fourth platform (besides iOS, Android, WP, Blackberry). Platform that only they were using. Was there any indication that they would have succeeded? Who knows. But contrary to what you are saying, their success was far from guaranteed.

Putting it on one device was more than Elop has achieved. Besides, that "bastardised" version of MeeGo was better than WP7 at the time - just read the reviews from that time.

Maybe it was, but that still doesn't mean that it had any future. Could it have been put on other devices? Was the developer-interest?

If Meego was so great and almost done, why hasn't Jolla shipped anything yet? They have worked on Meego for 2.5 years now.

I don't know if Meego would have succeeded or not. I just find the idea ludicrous that Meego was destined for victory, but Elop ruined it all, like some people are alluding to. Success of Meego was far from certain.

Before Elop's "Burning Platform" announcement, they were working on MeeGo which was Qt-based. They had a *growing* community interested in writing Qt applications for mobile devices.

With announcing work on a WinRT backend for Qt, you acknowledge the community that was interested in your platform (MeeGo) and give them a viable migration path. Instead, the announcement killed any/all activity in other companies that were looking at Qt as a viable mobile platform to develop to. You know, all the activity gained from the MeeGo community.

Quote:

Quote:

4. announced that they would be scaling down their efforts on MeeGo.

That's what they did.

Different emphasis. The point is to not bluntly say "this platform is dead".

Quote:

Quote:

This would have then appeased the developers -- Qt would still be used/supported as a development platform -- and framed the announcement in a nicer light.

Qt was always going to be left out in the cold.

Which is a failing on Nokia's part as it was their development platform moving forward, until Elop's "Burning Platform" announcement.

"Qt over WinRT" makes no sense, they are both frameworks. I imagine you mean "promoting Qt to a similar status as WindowsRT or the subset of it that is the WP8 framework because Windows' frameworks are still a mess", but that's the thing about owning a platform: Windows is Microsoft's platform, why would MS help Nokia's framework and nurture a competitor?

And what did those developers end up doing? Starting developing for iOS or Android? So if they were capable of doing THAT transition, why couldn't they make the transition to WP? Or if they did move to WP, then they did become developers for Nokia new platform. Or did they choose not to move to WP because it was too small? In that case, why did they stick to Qt/Symbian, which was crashing down?

Because there was nothing to transition to. Elop said "we're moving to Windows 8!" before there was even much information on ActiveRT let alone any examples or an SDK.

They said they are moving to WP, not specificly to WP8. WP7 was unveiled in early 2010, SDK was released in September same year.They couldn't transition to that because....?

This must further energize Apple/Google/Samsung to make a bid for Blackberry if and when it goes up for sale...

I wonder how this will play out in the future. Nokia was once the dominant mobile phone maker but was far too late and too invested in Symbian to effectively compete with iPhone and Android when they burgeoned into the market. *Looks wistfully at my old faithful N95 in the drawer*Hope Elop learnt some lessons on keeping up esp. if he's being primed as Microsoft CEO.

Why would the aforementioned companies want to purchase Blackberry? Their handsets are crap, and the only thing worth owning is Blackberry's IP as no one wants anything to do with anything else with the Blackberry name.

Janne, so the polemics aside, are you thoroughly happy with the way things turned out for Nokia post-Elop (i.e. the fact that it is no more)?

Of course not. I would have loved for Nokia to succeed. But just because how things turned out the way they did, does not mean that alternative strategy would have done one bit better.

Quote:

I mean, we could've had a strong fourth alternative and the only non-American one (nothing against the Americans, it's just that the American companies have lost a lot of trust recently). This must've been good for the consumers, right? Especially those ones who live "in the sticks".

I'm not all that interested in the "nationality" of the platforms. But who is to say that Meego would have been a "strong fourth alternative"? WP hasn't lit the world on fire, why would have Meego? WP is struggling, RIM is struggling, Jolla is a no-show. Ubuntu Phone never got off the ground, Firefox Phone, who the hell knows what's going on with that. Maybe market can't support this many platforms?

I find it strange that people simply assume that Meego would have succeeded.

How is the Xbox billions in the hole? Are you totally ignoring the profits from selling actual games, where almost all the revenue comes from?

Any analyst has estimated total ROI at negative $3 billion to date. Compare that with Apple at positive $90 billion on iPhone alone. That's 90:1 ROI for a friggen phone. Unbelievable, historic, astonishing, amazing. I am running out of superlatives.

And they re-used the iPhone work for the iPad, so the ROI for that is probably even higher.

What makes it funny is that more than 10 years ago, when Microsoft originally made a tablet version of Windows OS, the head of the group developing Office told the OS group: Fuck off, we won't make ANY changes to Office to make it work better on the tablet [things like having the on-screen keyboard show/hide as appropriate, for example]. So, the OS had to jump through hoops to make it kind of work, but it sucked.

And that was Bill's baby, where he saw the industry going [I guess, having seen the Newton], and he LET the Office group screw it up.

Bill Gates was simply to early when he saw into the future that would become the tablet market. I would agrue that even if Office was changed to support the tablet 10 years ago, because of the hardware, it would have still failed.

Microsoft wasn't a device company back then and didn't have the talent to do so.

Maybe it was, but that still doesn't mean that it had any future. Could it have been put on other devices? Was the developer-interest?

If Meego was so great and almost done, why hasn't Jolla shipped anything yet? They have worked on Meego for 2.5 years now.

I don't know if Meego would have succeeded or not. I just find the idea ludicrous that Meego was destined for victory, but Elop ruined it all, like some people are alluding to. Success of Meego was far from certain.

Same could be said about WP. You can hardly call it a success after 2+ years and billions of marketing poured into it. Nowadays, hype sells tech and MeeGo/N9 certainly had enough of that. WP, on the other hand...

Regarding Jolla, I think (just my opinion) that they haven't shipped anything yet because shipping just _one_ phone is a hard task - it's as much about hardware as it is about software. They did the software part pretty fast - check it out here: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/29/hand ... -os-video/

Almost ALL independent developers for the Nokia ecosystem were Qt developers, although some were working on WebRunTime just because it was the least braindead way of building apps for Symbian before Qt. So telling Qt developers to get lost was one sure-fire way of killing Nokia's platform dead.

Why? Apple basically did the same thing to them (as Apple required everyone to use Cocoa Touch and Objective-C), and it didn't harm them. Or are you saying that Nokia could only attract the small-time independent developers to Meego? Why did Apple and Google manage to attract not only those, but the big-time developers as well?

Cocoa Touch is based on the Cocoa APIs that Mac developers use to write Mac applications, so it is an additional set of APIs instead of a completely new platform. This makes transitioning from Mac to iPhone easier, and allows the developers to share code between the two platforms.

Objective-C is the preferred language to write applications for Apple products. It was not something new introduced specifically for the iPhone/iPad.

Quote:

And what did those developers end up doing? Starting developing for iOS or Android? So if they were capable of doing THAT transition, why couldn't they make the transition to WP?

Sure they could, and would need to to support other Windows Phone devices.

However, Nokia was already building a community around Qt Mobile with the interest in the MeeGo platform and getting companies interested in porting the applications to Qt.

Having applications targetting Qt makes it easier to target other platforms as Qt is cross-platform. This is interesting to companies as it simplifies the development costs, making it easier to support iPhone/iPad, Android and Windows Phone.

Quote:

Or if they did move to WP, then they did become developers for Nokia new platform. Or did they choose not to move to WP because it was too small? In that case, why did they stick to Qt/Symbian, which was crashing down?

Developers were interested in Qt/Symbian as it was seen as the transition from Symbian to MeeGo. When Elop announced that Nokia would not be supporting MeeGo, this left the people involved with transitioning their apps to Qt wondering what was going to happen.

It became clearer that Nokia had no intention of supporting Qt, especially on Windows Phone. Thus, they lost their entire development community.

Quote:

Like it or not, Qt was a dead end.

It was only a dead end because Nokia killed it. They had a growing/interested developer community.

Almost ALL independent developers for the Nokia ecosystem were Qt developers, although some were working on WebRunTime just because it was the least braindead way of building apps for Symbian before Qt. So telling Qt developers to get lost was one sure-fire way of killing Nokia's platform dead.

Why? Apple basically did the same thing to them (as Apple required everyone to use Cocoa Touch and Objective-C), and it didn't harm them. Or are you saying that Nokia could only attract the small-time independent developers to Meego? Why did Apple and Google manage to attract not only those, but the big-time developers as well?

And what did those developers end up doing? Starting developing for iOS or Android? So if they were capable of doing THAT transition, why couldn't they make the transition to WP? Or if they did move to WP, then they did become developers for Nokia new platform. Or did they choose not to move to WP because it was too small? In that case, why did they stick to Qt/Symbian, which was crashing down?

Like it or not, Qt was a dead end.

Apple had first-mover advantage, rabid desktop developers, and a Developer Conference where everyone already spoke Objective-C. Google had the Anything But Apple crowd for itself for years. Both had a massive echo chamber of sites and blogs going "oh my god oh my god look at this".

I don't know what the Qt developers ended up doing, but most of them were anti-Microsoft (having started developing when Windows Mobile was the enemy) and versed on Linux, so developing for iOS and Android would have been a lot easier that taking up Windows. I'd say the bigger ones made the transition because they had brand recognition and good relations with Nokia. The small timers abandoned ship.

Imagine if Steve Jobs had come out, presented Bill Gates on screen, and Bill Gates had said "thank you, Apple, for adopting Windows as your new OS" - what do you think Panic, or even Omni, would have done?

I'm not all that interested in the "nationality" of the platforms. But who is to say that Meego would have been a "strong fourth alternative"? WP hasn't lit the world on fire, why would have Meego? WP is struggling, RIM is struggling, Jolla is a no-show. Ubuntu Phone never got off the ground, Firefox Phone, who the hell knows what's going on with that. Maybe market can't support this many platforms?

I find it strange that people simply assume that Meego would have succeeded.

Because we know that irrespective of everything else Microsoft would've pressed on with WP and probably would've been in a similar position of mediocrity as it is now while losing tons of cash on it.

MeeGo already was a "strong fourth alternative" as it had a lot to show for it already back then. Elop never gave it a chance.

Interesting that it looks like future products will not have Nokia branding, and may just be called Microsoft Windows Phone

See slide 10 of the Microsoft presentation that was posted up earlier.The heading is "One Brand, United Voice" and it contains images of Lumia phones with ALL Nokia branding removed. Surely that was a deliberate action when creating that slide.(Although the phones on slide 11 do have Nokia branding)

For many markets (certainly here in Europe) the Nokia name is well known, and well trusted - certainly more so than than the Microsoft name.

Most people have had a Nokia phone in the past, and for those who bought / are about to buy their first smartphone the Nokia name is a familiar entry into a new world - this has surely helped Windows Phone's market share.These people are buying Lumias because of the Nokia name, not because of the Microsoft name.I doubt that many even know or care that Microsoft is involved in the new Nokias.

So to drop the Nokia brand (or to fail to license it) could be a mistake.

They need to obliterate Android so that their PC operating system can stay 'expensive to users' afloat.The likely tactic will be a cheap phone whilst long term crapping on it so that we then also need a complimenting tablet and a complimenting PC.

I suppose they could go it 100% alone and enslave manufacturing just like Apple do. Yet 3 systems = 3 lots of profit = happy shareholders.

They're not buying the mapping division? Why not? I guess they have Bing maps, but still. Seems pretty random to leave that out.

Navteq has a number of customers outside their internal phones; and Nokia undoubtedly wanted to keep all its good parts to itself.

Just to add to this- my older Nokia symbian phones use the Navteq maps with built in GPS.

I bought a Sony camcorder last year and was pleasantly surprised when it came with Navteq maps for the built in GPS. I fond the Navteq maps to be very handy on some of my overseas trip locations. I was able to use my phone without a data connection and charges to navigate to different places inside and outside of the urban areas.

And they re-used the iPhone work for the iPad, so the ROI for that is probably even higher.

Good point.

I'm still baffled why Microsoft didn't follow the same pattern for Surface.Windows Phone 7/8 is a great touch-based platform, and would work well if scaled up to tablet size (with the necessary tablet-focused adjustments of course).

Add to this the existing apps & store that Surface buyers & developers would be able to tap in to, and MS's tablet division could have had a lot of traction.With apps that link to both tablet & smartphone you would have the synergy between the two devices, and people who have bought one type of device are more likely to buy the other type of device from the same eco-system.

MS could have had 2 divisions - Windows 8 for PCs, and Windows Mobile 8 for smartphones and tablets.Nice and clean, everyone knows where the lines are, and what software runs on what device.Just like Apple having iOS and OS X.

But instead MS chose to have 3 eco-systems (Windows 8, Windows Mobile, Windows RT) and nobody knows where the lines are drawn.What OS does a Surface use?What's the difference between a Surface RT and a Pro?Why can't I get my Phone apps on my Tablet? I can with Apple, Samsung etc...

Maybe, just maybe, this could be the step towards MS using Surface as a companion/partner to mobiles rather than PCs. Surely Apple has provided enough evidence to show them that this is the path to follow.

They are working towards that. Windows EverywhereTM and all that. Don't forget the Xbox OS. Sharing the kernel between platforms and unifying the UI is a good start.

So the dream of a European smartphone running Android will never come true.

A lot of stuff inside the Sony Mobile (previously Sony Ericsson) Android-based phones are still developed in Lund, Sweden. The HQ was moved from Lund to Tokyo only last year, and they had made a bunch of Android models before that.

"Qt over WinRT" makes no sense, they are both frameworks. I imagine you mean "promoting Qt to a similar status as WindowsRT or the subset of it that is the WP8 framework because Windows' frameworks are still a mess", but that's the thing about owning a platform: Windows is Microsoft's platform, why would MS help Nokia's framework and nurture a competitor?

WinRT is the API developers use to write Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 applications targetting the interface previously known as Metro. This is like using the Win32 API to write Windows desktop applications, Gtk+ to write GNOME applications, Cocoa to write Mac applications, etc.

The advantage of using Qt is that it is platform agnostic, allowing applications written in Qt to run on any of the platforms that Qt supports. It does the heavy lifting of making the correct API calls for the different platforms.

A framework is just a collection of APIs that provide a specific way of writing applications. These can be for writing web services, or GUI applications, or ...

Microsoft.NET is a framework that targets either Win32 or WinRT, so Microsoft.NET makes no sense as .NET and WinRT are both frameworks.

The decisions at the time were precisely because Elop had Microsofts interests in mind, not Nokias. And why should Microsoft have had any control over what Nokia did, aside from getting Nokia to ship Windows Phone devices as part of the deal when Elop was made CEO?

I held on to my Black ferry until RIM made it clear that they had no intention of keeping up with Google and Apple. I have rocked several android phones (S4 now), but I lust after the Nokia phones I saw in the MS Store. They were sweet. If my carrier would get its act together, I'd have already purchased several. I'm excited to see what happens next with this brand. In always wondered why MS didn't out forth a brand like Apple and Google. It seems they're trying now.

"Qt over WinRT" makes no sense, they are both frameworks. I imagine you mean "promoting Qt to a similar status as WindowsRT or the subset of it that is the WP8 framework because Windows' frameworks are still a mess", but that's the thing about owning a platform: Windows is Microsoft's platform, why would MS help Nokia's framework and nurture a competitor?

WinRT is the API developers use to write Windows 8/Windows Phone 8 applications targetting the interface previously known as Metro. This is like using the Win32 API to write Windows desktop applications, Gtk+ to write GNOME applications, Cocoa to write Mac applications, etc.

The advantage of using Qt is that it is platform agnostic, allowing applications written in Qt to run on any of the platforms that Qt supports. It does the heavy lifting of making the correct API calls for the different platforms.

A framework is just a collection of APIs that provide a specific way of writing applications. These can be for writing web services, or GUI applications, or ...

Microsoft.NET is a framework that targets either Win32 or WinRT, so Microsoft.NET makes no sense as .NET and WinRT are both frameworks.

The decisions at the time were precisely because Elop had Microsofts interests in mind, not Nokias. And why should Microsoft have had any control over what Nokia did, aside from getting Nokia to ship Windows Phone devices as part of the deal when Elop was made CEO?

It's not Nokia's platform, Nokia could only add to it at the app, service or driver level. That kind of thing is only possible when you own the platform - witness Google having moved most of the "software platform" out of AOSP and into Google App Services because too many people "owned" AOSP, being open-source and all...

Almost ALL independent developers for the Nokia ecosystem were Qt developers, although some were working on WebRunTime just because it was the least braindead way of building apps for Symbian before Qt. So telling Qt developers to get lost was one sure-fire way of killing Nokia's platform dead.

Why? Apple basically did the same thing to them (as Apple required everyone to use Cocoa Touch and Objective-C), and it didn't harm them. Or are you saying that Nokia could only attract the small-time independent developers to Meego? Why did Apple and Google manage to attract not only those, but the big-time developers as well?

Cocoa Touch is based on the Cocoa APIs that Mac developers use to write Mac applications, so it is an additional set of APIs instead of a completely new platform. This makes transitioning from Mac to iPhone easier, and allows the developers to share code between the two platforms.

There are plenty of iOS-developers who are not Mac-developers. Probably most of the don't develop for Mac.

Quote:

Quote:

Like it or not, Qt was a dead end.

It was only a dead end because Nokia killed it. They had a growing/interested developer community.

They could have taken advantage of that and built on it.

They didn't.

They didn't because it was a dead end. After Meego was killed, there was no point in Qt. And maybe the "growing community" was like WP's market is growing: "growing", but not really.

First, it seems to me that Nokia's shareholders are the winners here. They get to unload a money-losing phone group that's already lost most of its value.

Second, although I've certainly never started making phones from scratch, I'm not sure why Microsoft needed to buy Nokia in order to start making its own phones.

Third, who would license Windows Phone now that it's seen as a loser in the market AND Microsoft would be competing with you?

First: Nokia is known for phones, however. Nokia use to be the world's leader in cell phones. Thus, it will somewhat be a loss of face for Nokia's shareholders.

Second: Microsoft had to buy Nokia in order to build its own phones. The patent rights obtained in the deal are key to building its own phones. I'm sure Motorola/Google would be hesitant to license its patnets to Microsoft otherwise.

Third: Google is fully competing with other Android Manufacturers with its Motorola division. Thus, having an alternative to Google is important for the companies who have to compete with Google also.

We all saw this coming. Now all Microsoft has to do to have a decent mobile phone platform is revive MeeGo.

You have obviously never spent any time with a Win 8 phone. As a cell phone degenerate who's tried almost every type of phone and OS, it's easily the slickest and easiest to use phone OS on the market IMO. Add a larger app market, and I see Windows phone easily reaching #2, behind only Android based phones.

We all saw this coming. Now all Microsoft has to do to have a decent mobile phone platform is revive MeeGo.

You have obviously never spent any time with a Win 8 phone. As a cell phone degenerate who's tried almost every type of phone and OS, it's easily the slickest and easiest to use phone OS on the market IMO. Add a larger app market, and I see Windows phone easily reaching #2, behind only Android based phones.

You have obviously never spent any time with an N9. I know it because Elop determined it.

We all saw this coming. Now all Microsoft has to do to have a decent mobile phone platform is revive MeeGo.

You have obviously never spent any time with a Win 8 phone. As a cell phone degenerate who's tried almost every type of phone and OS, it's easily the slickest and easiest to use phone OS on the market IMO. Add a larger app market, and I see Windows phone easily reaching #2, behind only Android based phones.

If it were that easy, why wouldn't it have already happened? This deal doesn't magically make Windows Phone 8 massively more attractive to buyers. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I don't see where the "Easily" part comes in. You can probably expect the non Microsoft Windows Phone 8 oems to ditch it and go pure Android- which puts Microsoft in the same position as Apple (sole provider of OS and hardware). It's not going to be that easy for a single vendor with tiny mindshare in mobile to outsell Apple any time soon.

So the dream of a European smartphone running Android will never come true.

A lot of stuff inside the Sony Mobile (previously Sony Ericsson) Android-based phones are still developed in Lund, Sweden. The HQ was moved from Lund to Tokyo only last year, and they had made a bunch of Android models before that.

A lot of the imaging stuff (most actually) in the new Lumias is also developed in Lund, Sweden. I sincerely hope we will be allowed to stay here indefinitely. I hear whenever apple buys, people have to move to California or leave.

We all saw this coming. Now all Microsoft has to do to have a decent mobile phone platform is revive MeeGo.

You have obviously never spent any time with a Win 8 phone. As a cell phone degenerate who's tried almost every type of phone and OS, it's easily the slickest and easiest to use phone OS on the market IMO. Add a larger app market, and I see Windows phone easily reaching #2, behind only Android based phones.

+1 from me. WP8 is slick. If, like me, you don't need one app for everything, it's easily better than Android (I don't compare with iOS because I never owned an iPhone). You buy a cheap-o phone like the 520 and everything is super-smooth, even with loads of contacts, apps running on background, etc. Live tiles are a great concept. If you DO need an app for everything, don't let the lies being thrown around on many websites fool you -- almost every big service out there is represented in Microsoft's App Store (Instagram being the only exception that comes to my mind, for which there are several top-quality unofficial apps anyway).

BUT:

It could be oh-so-much better. Notification center. Separate volume controls for games for example -- at the moment it's impossible to mute games while leaving the phone on for calls, which is how I'd like it). Skype integration. And other woes. But I still prefer it to Android.

About the article: I'm at the same time happy and hesitant about this move. I love Nokia's brand, and recent times showed a great customer service from Nokia to its Lumia customers, not to mention kick-ass hardware for the price. I hope Microsoft can continue those trends.

The weird thing is, I don't really see this helping them. It kind of makes sense if they want to full invest in Windows Phone, but in the Windows 8 / RT side, their problems were never hardware. Most tech sites actually said hardware-wise, Microsoft Surface was very impressive. But the weirdness of Windows 8, and especially the uselessness (and confusion) of RT, is mainly what brought them down in that transition.

This must further energize Apple/Google/Samsung to make a bid for Blackberry if and when it goes up for sale...

I wonder how this will play out in the future. Nokia was once the dominant mobile phone maker but was far too late and too invested in Symbian to effectively compete with iPhone and Android when they burgeoned into the market. *Looks wistfully at my old faithful N95 in the drawer*Hope Elop learnt some lessons on keeping up esp. if he's being primed as Microsoft CEO.

google has motorola, samsung "copies" so why buy a brand.., so that leaves Apple, i believe Apple is watching RIM, like a "friend of the family"(apple)watchs a "family"(rim) company, but the "FOTF" thinks if would not be so bad to have the company, but only to save it... thus Apple will be waiting for RIM to "circle the drain" and stay there, until it thinks about getting it (of course if it does not get it RIM won't be in any condition to compete, thus it will become moot point if it loses the sale.) (BTW, the Canadian Gov won't be bailing out RIM...) yes Blackberry is the new RIM.